NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The vidwhacker program grabs an image from disk, or from the system’s
video input, then applies random image filters to it, and displays the
result. The vidwhacker program does not terminate until killed.
It depends heavily on the various PBM tools (e.g., ppmrelief(1).)
Selection of random image files is done by running the xscreensaver-getimage-file(1) program. Capture of video frames (if requested) is
done by running the xscreensaver-getimage-video(1) program. The
options of whether to do video, and which directory to search for
images, are specified in the ~/.xscreensaver file.

OPTIONS

vidwhacker accepts the following options:
-root Draw on the root window. This is the default.
-verbose
Print diagnostics.
-stdin Instead of grabbing an image from disk or video, read an image
to manipulate from stdin. This image must be in ppm(5) format.
The program will still perform repeated random image
transformations, but it will always use this one image as its
starting point.
-delayseconds
How long to sleep between images. Default 5 seconds (the
actual elapsed time is significantly longer, due to processing
time.)
-stdout Instead of displaying the image on a window or on the root,
write the new image on stdout, and exit.
-directorydirectory
Use this directory instead of the imageDirectory specified in
the ~/.xscreensaver file.
-fps Display the current frame rate and CPU load.

ENVIRONMENT

DISPLAY to get the default host and display number.
XENVIRONMENT
to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global
resources stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property.

BUGS

It’s slow.

TODO

It might be interesting to rewrite this to use gimp(1) plugins instead
of the pbm tools. It probably wouldn’t be any faster, but there would
be a wider variety of effects available.